by J. Stone
The main part of this thing was a greasy, green orb, which had metal wires running along its surface. Beside this main orb were smaller but similar sections. They formed a sort of rim around it and each of them glowed a different color, making up a sort of sickly rainbow design. They glowed with varying intensity, and the green orb at the base was the brightest. She watched, however, as the little green orb faded, while the yellow one illuminated brighter. The main orb at the center then shifted its color from green to yellow, matching the brightest orb. After a few moments more of staring at this strange thing, the color shifted again, in a clockwork fashion.
Not knowing what this device was, how it worked, or what function it served, Wynonna did know one thing. It was a simple truth that she felt to her core - she had to destroy this machine.
Wynonna didn’t know how to turn off this strange device, but she figured she could handle destroying it just fine. On the far side of this set of planks was an open section of the tower, broken from years of neglect, and it would serve as the perfect place for this device. If she could push it along these planks and through that ragged hole, gravity and the cobbled ground below would take care of the rest. She just hoped no one got in her way on the streets.
Leaning down and putting her hands to the greasy surface of the main orb, Wynonna tried to push it. Despite its appearance, the device was much heavier than she would’ve expected. She only nudged it a little before her hands slipped and her whole body slopped into the orb’s surface.
“Gross,” she muttered to herself, leaning back and wiping the residual muck from her skin and clothes.
Whatever she did, she would have to find a better way to deal with that mucous-covered object. Unfortunately, her previous attempt at moving the object had brought some unwanted attention. From the rafters overhead, something dropped down and landed behind her. Wynonna twirled around, pulling her revolver and aiming it at the creature she knew had to be Azus.
The bullet exploded out the barrel of the revolver and slipped right under Azus’s slender arm. He was thinner than she naturally expected, and she didn’t have time to right her aim and fire again. Azus snarled and scratched at her weapon, knocking it from her hand and slashing her fingers as well. She heard the revolver crash against the metal clockwork in that tower, ricocheting from one piece to another before plummeting further down into its depths.
Wynonna ignored the pain burning in her hand and focused on dealing with Azus. Without the revolver, she was less prepared to deal with the threat he posed, but she was stubborn and refused to give up. With her other hand, Wynonna grabbed her knife. As Azus swung at her again, she held it up, holding it perfectly perpendicular to his fingers. The runed blade sliced through them with flawless effort, and the twisted creature howled from the pain.
Thinking to follow this attack up with a body blow, Wynonna pushed herself up and toward the lithe figure, but it wasn’t to be. Azus grabbed her hand by the wrist, squeezing so tight that she nearly felt the bones snap in his grip. She didn’t mean to drop the knife, but with those fingers clutched around her wrist, she didn’t have much of a choice. Just as with the revolver, the knife clanged against the metal and disappeared down the tower.
“You!” Azus hissed, lifting Wynonna up by her wrist.
It felt like the bones in her hand would pop out of place if he pulled any harder.
“Azus,” she spat back, hanging there and grimacing at her captor. Meanwhile, her bloody hand worked behind her. Her duster had flapped behind her, and the pocket that contained the grenade Autumn had given her was just out of sight of Azus.
“You were meant to die!” Azus told her, his lipless mouth inches from her face. “Tarasi and Muzga should have slowly ripped you to pieces.”
“Sorry to disappoint,” Wynonna said, still fishing for the grenade.
“I should’ve just killed Rohan myself. I never should have left it to you!”
“Hindsight,” she muttered.
“You’ve ruined years of work, and for what?”
“I cleared my master’s name,” she replied with a little smile. “I found Rohan’s killer. I exposed you.”
“A paltry list of achievements. Your master was a deviant and stuttering idiot, and Rohan was nothing but a smart mouth fool. And as for me? My work will continue. Your efforts have done nothing to save you. Your world will still crumble and slip into darkness.”
“This was your world once too.” Wynonna’s hand finally gripped around the grenade, but removing its pin could be another matter altogether. She had to keep him talking while she tried to get it out with just one hand. “How can you do this to your own people?”
“My people?” he spat. “These… wretches haven’t been my people for decades.”
Wynonna looped her pinky through the pin while trying to push it away from the core of the grenade. “What could they have possibly done to you to make you switch sides and… what is your goal anyway?”
Azus paused and stared at her for a moment. Then what remained of the skin around his teeth contorted into a twisted smile. “That machine has taken me years to build. I won’t let you take it from me now.”
“What does it do?” she asked, fumbling with the grenade and its pin in her pocket.
“You won’t live to find out.”
Wynonna finally managed to slide the pin out, and that meant she didn’t have much time. A few seconds Autumn had told her. She didn’t waste them. While she dropped the explosive behind her, Wynonna covered the thunking sound as best she could by yelling, “Then do it, you coward!”
Wynonna knew she couldn’t just stay there. She had to fight. Wynonna raised her legs up, wrapping them around his long arm. She pulled back against his elbow, forcing Azus to bend it and lean forward, so that she was now hanging off the edge of that narrow plank, and that his body bent over the side with her. His grip tightened on her wrist even further, but she ignored the pain. With her free but bloody hand, Wynonna gripped the wood and pulled herself down. She cut her eyes over to the grenade, expecting it to explode any second.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Azus asked. He saw her eyes and followed them to the grenade. “No!” he shouted, reaching for the grenade with the hand consisting of little more than a series of bloody stumps.
Wynonna couldn’t let him grab it though. She refused to let this all fail, so she lowered her legs to the wood planks, using it as leverage against him. Azus turned his head back toward her and snarled.
“Fine!” he spat. “Then you can fall!”
Azus released his grip on her, and Wynonna dropped. The grenade chose that moment perfectly to explode, and she watched the debris of clock parts, wooden planks, and the strange collection of flesh and metal from the profane’s machine. Azus’s body flew up along with everything else, but she couldn’t tell how much damage he suffered. The blast, however, also launched her downward that much faster.
Wynonna tried to twist around to at least see what she tumbled toward, but before she could, her shoulder slammed into a wooden plank, breaking her fall. It cracked in half, however, and she kept falling, now twirling head to toe. Once again, she tried to steady herself in her fall, but it was a pointless endeavor. Wynonna crashed into another set of planks. These were sturdier, but the effect was the same, as she plummeted through them. They slowed her fall somewhat, but there was still a long way to go.
When she finally managed to look down to what she fell towards, Wynonna saw a series of metal beams crisscrossing below her. These weren’t going to crack and break like the wooden planks had, but she couldn’t do much about it either. After a second or two, Wynonna felt one of the hard cold metal beams smash into her ribs. She flipped off it, reeling in pain, and cracked her foot against another. A wider beam that happened to be parallel with her body in that moment was where she finally landed, and her head hit hard enough that blackness engulfed her instantly.
***
Gasping for breath, Wynonna opened her eyes agai
n. She didn’t know how long she had been unconscious, but staring up into the Black Tea Tower, she could still see the wood burning above her. No one had come to put a stop to the blaze or even investigate the explosion, and she was sure it would draw a crowd with enough time.
With concentrated effort, Wynonna raised her hand to see how much the slashes there had healed. She grunted from the exertion but still managed to get it in front of her face. The wounds remained open, but they had improved a little. The progress of the fire and her regeneration were poor ways to tell time, but they worked well enough in that moment. Her concern then was whether she’d successfully destroyed the machine and if Azus still lingered in that burning clock tower.
From what she remembered of the blast, Wynonna thought she saw the wet, chunks of that orb flying with the explosion. Besides, the planks it had been stored on had to have given way in the wake of the grenade. That meant that whatever remained of them would have fallen along with her.
Her chest hurt enough already, but she had to make sure it was over. Groaning, she rolled over to one side, favoring her less bruised set of ribs. Peering over the side of the metal beam she now rested upon, Wynonna saw pieces of it - that metal stitched into the oozing jelly flesh that made up the orb. It was in a liquid heap. It was destroyed, and none of the colorful lights she’d seen before illuminated it.
That wasn’t all she saw though. As Wynonna rolled over to her back again, she spotted a terrifying figure. On a beam parallel to hers, Azus landed, standing there in a hunched posture and burning from the grenade’s explosion. The licking flames had scarred some of his skin, but the fire still covered much of his body. He wasn’t dead yet, while she felt like she was on the verge of it.
Her revolver was gone. Her knife was gone. Even the grenade she’d kept for emergencies was gone. There was no way she could fight Azus with her bare hands. Giving her no time to process the situation, the flaming profane leapt from his beam to hers, and all she could do was wince as he landed there in front of her. Her revolver; she needed her revolver. Where was it? It had to have fallen somewhere nearby. She hadn’t seen it when she leaned over to check for the orb’s destruction, but that had only shown her half of the floor beneath her.
Grimacing at what she knew she had to do, Wynonna rolled in the opposite direction, onto her now obviously broken ribs. She screamed under her breath at the pain, but it was worth it. Wynonna spotted her gun, sitting there in a pile of rubble and debris almost directly beneath her. Azus, meanwhile, approached her on that beam, fire still burning wildly on his body, but with him completely unconcerned.
Wynonna took a deep breath and finished rolling, so that she fell off that beam. Plummeting to the ground, she tried to control the fall, and she put her hands in front of her to soften the blow. It did little to help, as she landed badly, the hand Azus had clutched, snapping back and the bones inside her wrist breaking. She shrieked from the pain and rolled off the wrist so that she was on her back again. Looking up, she saw the flaming Azus leap off the beam as well, coming to a much softer landing on the floor in front of her.
“You’ve broken the device!” he shouted at her in a roaring, pained voice, approaching, one slow foot after the other.
Wynonna crawled backward, knowing her revolver was still a couple feet behind her. She said nothing and simply smiled at Azus, showing him her blood-tinged teeth.
Reaching his flaming hand out toward her, Azus screeched, “You are nothing! You are an insect! This is not how it ends!”
Feeling something cold and hard clash against her spine, Wynonna’s smile widened. With her unbroken hand, she reached behind her and wrapped her bloody fingers around the weapon. “Glad I could prove you wrong,” she told him.
Azus tilted his head and looked at her with a wave of confusion washing over his face. She’d be more than happy for that to be the last face he ever made. Wynonna jerked the revolver out from behind her with her bloody hand, aimed, and pulled the trigger. She kept pulling the trigger until the chamber was empty and the gun made nothing but clicking noises in response. Five bloody bullet holes sat in Azus’s body, his narrow chest still heaving up and down. He looked down at them, pressing his fingers to one of the holes. He then dropped to his knees but refused to die yet.
Azus crawled forward on his knobby knees, reaching out to Wynonna with his clawed hand as the flames continued to consume him. Wynonna tried to move further back, but every inch of her body howled in agony. Her body and mind both wanted to give up. She’d accomplished all she set out to do. Maybe it was enough. She’d cleared Corrigan’s name, identified Rohan’s killer, exposed the corrupted elder, and now destroyed the device, which somehow threatened their city and possibly world. Azus wouldn’t last much longer. Maybe she could just let go.
The flaming creature’s hand neared her throat but before Azus grabbed her, a blast exploded from behind her. Wynonna looked up to see a new bullet hole in the profane’s head. A second gunshot followed, and the force knocked Azus’s body backward. Then, a blast of copper-colored light shot across the room, sending the profane hurtling into the far wall. Riddled with bullet holes, burning from the flames of the explosion, and knocked clear from obvious magic. Wynonna twisted her head back to see both Ambrose and PJ standing behind her. She was too tired to stay awake any longer. Wynonna drifted off, letting what would be, be.
***
Even without the help of Petronila, Wynonna still had nightmares as she slept off her injuries in the following week. She woke briefly several times throughout those days, each time covered in sweat and fighting imagined enemies. Her body continued trying to recover from the wounds inflicted from the explosion, the fall, and Azus, but her mind had farther to go. Ambrose, Spencer, Autumn, and Magnus all took shifts watching over her, trying to keep her from succumbing to her injuries. With a vespari, that largely meant keeping the patient alive until their regeneration could kick in, but they took this very seriously all the same.
Though her body had mostly healed over the course of that week, Wynonna still slept, plagued by visions of the other world and fears of what would happen to her. When she finally woke one late afternoon, Autumn sat in her wheelchair by her side. Wynonna opened her eyes only to see the quartermaster flinch back at the development.
“What’s wrong?” Wynonna asked.
Autumn relaxed a little. “Is… is that you?”
“Of course it’s me. Why wouldn’t it be?”
With a timid smile, the quartermaster said, “You’ve haven’t quite been yourself since Ambrose found you up there.”
Ignoring this bit of information, Wynonna asked, “What about Azus? The device? Is it over?”
“Ambrose says so, yeah.”
“What was that thing? That machine?”
“They don’t know. No one has ever seen anything like it before, but that young man you brought--”
“PJ?”
Autumn nodded. “He said something about how it was attracting monsters and making them stronger.”
Wynonna had no response, just staring at the ceiling for a moment. “So, is PJ okay?”
“I guess so. He left while you were out.” Autumn sat upright at this mention though and reached into her pocket. “He did ask me to give you this though.” Autumn held out her hand, revealing the bloody silver round, which contained Petronila’s essence.
“Of course he did,” she muttered.
“He also said that you wouldn’t have to worry about any more bad dreams. Does that mean something to you?”
Wynonna smiled. “Yeah. You can just put it on the stand.”
Autumn did as she told her and then folded her arms at her chest and frowned.
“What?” Wynonna asked, eyeing the quartermaster suspiciously.
“I wish you’d told me about all this. I could have helped you.”
Wynonna smiled. “You did. That grenade. Without your help I wouldn’t have been able to destroy that thing.”
“Mm,” she replied,
not budging. “Still.”
“I’ll do better,” Wynonna told her. “I’ll do better.”
“You better.”
“I will.”
“What about Nicolae?”
Autumn shook her head. “He’s gone. I still can’t believe it.”
“What happened to him after that profane abandoned him?”
“Ambrose says that Nicolae was only alive because of the profane. When he left him behind like that, Nicolae couldn’t sustain himself with the years of injuries. Apparently the two could only be separated for short periods.”
“At least it’s over.”
“Well… what about you? How are you feeling? Ambrose wanted to know when you’re up.”
She looked down at the covers over her body. “I feel like I’m still in one piece.” She paused a moment and reached for the blankets, lifting them up. “I’m also naked.”
Autumn smiled coquettishly. “I had to examine your wounds.”
“I bet,” she replied, returning that same smile. “But to answer your question, I think I’m okay. Still feel a little bruised.” Wynonna raised her hand, wrapped in bandages. “And I’m betting this guy’s still broken. Otherwise, I’m alright.”
“You think you could walk?”
“You wanting to take me on an afternoon stroll?”
“Something like that. Give it a try. It’ll be worth it, I promise.”
Wynonna nodded. “Alright. Give me a hand.”
Autumn reached her hand out to Wynonna, who took it without hesitation and used her help to slide off the side of the bed. When she got there, she flipped off the covers and sat up, throwing her legs over the side. The quartermaster rolled her chair backward and smiled at Wynonna.